“I perish with anticipation,” said Mohrvine through gritted teeth, “to learn what other changes have taken place that we do not yet know about.”
“Don’t fight me, Uncle,” said Oryn softly. “I’m begging you. I need your help.”
Mohrvine said nothing, but swept back his cloak and executed a profound bow to the three teyn standing silent in the garden arch. Then he turned and stalked from the room.
FIFTY-THREE
It has all changed.” Raeshaldis perched on the top of the knee-high wall of black stone that circled the little group of healing houses and looked out over the beach to the sea. It had rained just before sunset, and in the final fading of the twilight, the jungle gave back the perfume of water and wet plants. Though the night was warm, clouds moved like a silent army across the sky.
The moon was waxing toward full.
She would wake soon, in her chamber off the Citadel’s Court of Novices where she had fallen asleep, but lingered within the green enchanted circle of her dream.
“Things that used to keep us safe don’t protect us anymore. Even with the jennies—the females of the Little People—to help, we still don’t know if we’ll be able to bring the rains in the spring. And without the teyn to help, farming’s at a standstill, and the situation’s only going to get worse. Everyone wants things to go back to the way they were, and nobody wants to hear that that’s impossible.”
She sighed and made a helpless gesture with her hands. Oryn’s story, one Mohrvine was backing up, was that the gods had decreed the teyn be liberated: a source of endless trouble but not nearly as dangerous, to the teyn themselves, as the truth would be. “The thing I want to know—the thing all the mages want to know—is what caused it? Why is this happening? Why did the world change? Do you know?”
She turned to look down at Puahale, who sat at the foot of the little wall, with the spell diagrams they had worked on that afternoon still spread around her in the tree-sheltered sand. She had taught Puahale to scry, and they had spent some time memorizing words of each other’s languages. The thought that the nature of magic, the nature of the universe, might further shift to make it impossible for her to return in dream to this place filled Raeshaldis with grief, but at least, she thought, they could be prepared to establish other means to communicate.
And the Sigil of Sisterhood, the circle of those who called down their power from the moon, would bind their souls and their magic forever. That much she knew in her bones.
“Why did magic change?” she asked softly. “Why did it go into women and leave men? Why can the females of the Little People now do it, as well as women of our race? One of the lords of my country says that magic changed because the gods are angry with us, even though the king passed through the tests that are supposed to say the gods approve of what he does. Another lord says that there’s some massively evil superwizard somewhere, who’s placed a curse on every mage in the world.”
That was Lord Sarn. And presumably, thought Shaldis, when his lordship managed to find that superwizard he’d try to hire him.
“Do your wizards, your teachers, know? Or know anything about it?”
“We asked the djinni that,” replied Puahale, after some moments spent in thought.
“Are they still around?” Shaldis spoke in surprise, though she had her suspicions about where other djinni had gone to, besides the mad spirit hiding in the idol in the deserted Temple of Nebekht.
Pontifer Pig, she was almost certain, was a djinn, who had taken his shape from the form within Pomegranate’s genial hallucinations.
And sometimes she thought she glimpsed a shimmering intelligence looking out at her from the eyes of some of the palace cats.
“Well,” said Puahale, “they had to become something else, too. The way we used to be little girls before we became women, and the way my father turned from an angry warrior into a gentle old man.
“My teacher Wika had a dream, ten years ago, when the djinni disappeared and our wise men could no longer bring the big schools of fish into the lagoons. She and I took a canoe far out into the ocean, where the whales swim. Do you know whales?”
Shaldis shook her head, the image coming to her mind of hugeness and water. Perhaps like the lake monsters Soth had described?
“The djinni live inside them now,” said Puahale. “The whales themselves don’t mind, they said. But the djinni can no longer live as once they lived. Some of them are angry about it, and some of them went mad. But the one we called Red-Haired Woman, one of the djinni most friendly to us, told my teacher why this happened. And it didn’t make any sense.”
She shrugged, dismissing the matter, as if it were of little moment.
Shaldis sprang down from the wall, suddenly angry with this big, easygoing woman who had never had to worry about the rains, who had never had to struggle to learn spells that men grudged to teach her, nor to twist with pain inside wondering if a day would come when she must choose between her power and Jethan’s arms.
“How can you say that?” she demanded. “How can you just let it go with that? Didn’t you ask what the djinn meant? Or seek in other legends, other tales, for the meaning of what it said?”
Puahale raised her eyebrows, surprised by this outburst. “What good would it have done?”
“We might be able to find a way to . . .” Shaldis hesitated.
To what? Give magic back to men, if it meant that women would lose it again, and go back to what they had been?
Send the teyn back into the bondage of people who killed them as casually as they slaughtered stray dogs?
Would that bring back the rains?
Helpless, she was silent for a time. Then, “What did she say? Red-Haired Woman, I mean.”
Her friend looked relieved, that the quick, frustrated rage had vanished from her voice and her eyes. She frowned for a moment, looking out to sea, as if to call back the djinn’s exact words to her mind. Except, of course, Shaldis realized, the djinni did not speak in human words, but rather in this precise dream language that she used with Puahale, of thoughts and images transferred mind to mind. And like the crashing of the sea before she had seen its waves break on the shore, that which could not be recognized was meaningless.
“Red-Haired Woman said,” recited Puahale, closing her eyes and holding up one finger, “that the world, the sun, and all the stars had fallen through a giant hole into another part of Everything, so that all the little pieces of—of sand—of something, that make up Everything, have all started to vibrate at a different speed than they used to. This changed the way the sun shines and the way this—this magic water that is in people’s bodies—works, and so our brains work differently.”
Shaldis said, “What?”
Puahale opened her eyes. “I told you it didn’t make any sense.”
Shaldis tried to imagine offering that explanation to Lord Sarn, with the added remark that it came from something a giant fish had told a woman she’d met in her dreams.
A malign superwizard casting a spell on the world was a far more believable tale. And keeping Lord Sarn looking for him would distract that powerful landchief from making trouble over the emancipation of the teyn.
The information that the djinni had taken refuge in giant water creatures, she thought, she would also keep to herself, at least until she could pay a call on Hokiros.
But even an explanation that made sense, reflected Shaldis as she walked with her friend down to the sea, might well have been useless, if there was nothing that could be done to change matters.
After a time she asked, “Is that how magic really works?”
And Puahale shrugged again. “Maybe the djinni don’t know any more than we do.”
It was a disconcerting thought. The waves crashed on the beach, sent their warm sheets of water rushing up to curl around the two women’s ankles, the touch of it a whisper of power. The great wise ones, Puahale had said, could source power from the strength and movement of the sea, and Raeshaldis felt that
power like a glow in her heart.
“No one really knew how magic worked before it changed, did they?” Shaldis asked. “Much less afterward.”
Puahale shook her head. “Any more than we know—or ever knew—what life is, or why we love and need to be loved. All we can do is live as well as we can, use our magic for the highest good of the world, and love, ourselves as well as others, with the whole of our hearts.”
“Is that possible?” asked Shaldis softly. “To love someone, and still keep your heart strong to do magic?” She still ached inside with the confusion and grief at her grandfather’s death, with the way Tulik was stepping in already to command the family, as if their father was simply another child. He’d pushed and maneuvered their father into the proctorship within a few days of Chirak Shaldeth’s death, and neither he, nor any of the other family members whom Shaldis had rescued, recalled much about the incident, though in all other respects they were well.
The previous week, Tulik had hired Ahure as an adviser. Some things, at least, didn’t change.
And she still felt a tangled confusion of emotions about Jethan, worrying when he was silent, aching with passion when he took her in his arms, her mind returning to him again and again when they were apart. Wondering what he was doing and thinking, praying that no act of hers would somehow destroy the delight of his love. How can I be a Crafty woman, a Raven sister, when the mere touch of a man’s hand makes me melt like this inside?
It can’t last, and then what will I do?
“Of course it’s possible.” Puahale put her arm around Shaldis’s shoulders, hugged her like a sister, like her own family back on Sleeping Worms Street. “You’ll find how it works best for you, the same way you found how your power works best. Look!” She turned and pointed out to sea. “There they are. The whales.”
Shaldis stood in the froth of the surf, gazing across the moonlit ocean at the far-off shapes of monstrous flukes, of black curving backs glittering as they dived. The djinni, she thought. Adjusting to their new lives, in exile from the magic that had been theirs.
Could they, like she, source magic from the sea?
Would they, like Pontifer Pig, gradually strengthen in their new shapes and one day become something more than a shadow in someone else’s mind?
It was time to go home. The surge of the wave washed around her knees, dragged on her white robe where she’d kilted it high. The sun was rising above the Yellow City, as the last of its light flickered and slipped from the sky above the endless sea to the west. The crashing of the waves seemed to gather her up, to bear her back through the darkness. Having touched the strength of the limitless waters, having heard the sea, she felt that she could do anything, learn anything, conquer anything.
Anything except the yearnings of her own heart.
And maybe, she thought, waking and turning her head to see Jethan still sleeping beside her in the sun-streaked quiet of the Citadel of the Sun, maybe even those as well.
She reached across, wanting to touch his hair, like rough dark silk pillowed on her arm, but not wanting to wake him. And as she moved her head, she saw on the other side of the room her white novice’s robe, lying where she’d discarded it last night across the little table beside the door.
Its hem, she saw, was soaked with seawater, just beginning to drip down onto the tiles of the floor.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barbara Hambly was born in San Diego on August 28, 1951, and grew up in Southern California amid daydreams, Beatlemania, and Flower Power. She attended the University of California, Riverside, where she obtained a master’s degree in medieval history and a black belt in Shotokan Karate. She later taught a year of high school, waited tables, taught karate, shelved books in the local library, and was “downsized” out of the aerospace industry two days after signing her first book contract in 1981. For many years she was best known for writing sword-and-sorcery fantasy, with occasional excursions into vampire tales, Star Trek and Star Wars novels, but has recently branched out into a series of well-reviewed historical whodunits as well. A world traveler, she has served as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America, is the holder of a Lifetime Achievement Award from Romantic Times BOOKclub Magazine, and at one point in her life wrote scripts for cartoon shows. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
CAPTIVATING FANTASY FROM BARBARA HAMBLY
SISTERS OF THE RAVEN
The Yellow City is in crisis. Men have always possessed the magic that sustains civilization, from healing the sick to calling the rains to keeping mice from the granaries. Now the rains are weeks late, the wells are drying up, and the Sun Mages cannot summon the powers that the empire needs to survive. When magic appears—inexplicably—in the hands of a few women, the men react swiftly and furiously. Raeshaldis, the only girl ever accepted to the College of the Sun Mages, finds the mages won’t teach her the spells. Corn-Tassle Woman’s budding powers can’t protect her from an abusive husband. And the Summer Concubine must play the dutiful consort even as danger looms for her Raven sisters. For while famine threatens and fanatics riot, someone is killing the most gifted female magic-workers…
PRAISE FOR
SISTERS OF THE RAVEN
“Smart, thoughtful… keenly imagined… vividly convincing.”
—SUZY MCKEE CHARNAS,
author of The Slave and the Free
“This is Barbara Hambly at the very top of her form… Read this one!”
—HARRY TURTLEDOVE,
author of the American Empire series
Returning to the wondrous world of Sisters of the Raven, Barbara Hambly presents a suspenseful new story of a fledgling group of women who must develop their own magic abilities—before the demons of the past return to kill again…
A MAGIC WOMAN’S WORK IS NEVER DONE
The laws of magic have changed—no one knows how or why. And with that change, new perils have arisen: deadly water monsters from the depths of the Seven Lakes and a plague of madness in the desert. In the strongholds of human safety, anger and greed bloom as nobles and landchiefs fight for power. Raeshaldis, the only woman formally trained in the old systems of male magic, allies herself with the beautiful concubine Summerchild to found the Circle of the Moon—a motley group of women whose powers are unknown and unreliable. Faced with an attempt by the landchiefs to oust the king and with the efforts of her family to re-enslave her, Raeshaldis must play a deadly guessing game with untested spells and questionable allies, while an even more terrible threat awaits…
“Couldn’t put it down until the end…a great fantasy.”
—MyShelf.com
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